Gracie Gardner drew on her experiences as a fencer when she wrote Athena, her 2018 play about a pair of very different teenagers who are getting to know each other while practicing for the Junior Olympics. It deals with their contrasting backgrounds, the losses that are an inevitable part of competitive sports and how the characters use that environment to work out their true desires.
Undermain Theatre was supposed to produce Athena in 2020, but then COVID-19 hit. Well-reviewed everywhere it has been staged, it’s finally reaching Dallas to open the Deep Ellum company’s new season.
“I wrote a tiny version when I was in high school,” Gardner, 33, says in a phone interview. “I was obsessed with Shakespeare, the sword fighting, which you don’t get a chance to do in contemporary plays. I thought it would be theatrical.”
Back in New York City after a couple of years living upstate, she talked about growing up making up theatrical stories for her friends to perform, her time as a fencer and the 2017 play with the strange premise (the main character menstruates crude oil) that put her on the map. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is fencing a good backdrop for a play?
I was excited about the sonic experience of seeing it on stage, the way foils hitting each other sounds, the percussive element of it. You can incorporate the rhythmic nature of fencing with fight choreography in a way that is expressive for actors. It feels like a conversation.
Did the fencing idea come first or the idea of two young women getting to know each other?
They were entwined. Here are two people trying to better themselves, but neither of them are being fully upfront about what’s going on. One is being more cagey. Both are guarding themselves and in this defensive position, literally armored up the whole time. There’s only one scene where they take off the protective equipment, and one of them gets badly hurt.
How are Mary Wallace and Athena different and similar to one another?
They’re a little bit of city mouse, country mouse. Mary Wallace has a loving, relatively healthy family dynamic in the suburbs and is sheltered. Athena has chosen this name for herself. She has a dysfunctional family dynamic and doesn’t have a way to talk about what she’s going through. It bursts through the seams of her life. They’re both aching for connection and they don’t know how to communicate that to each other.
What do they talk about?
They use fencing as a way to talk about their issues. They talk about their strategies and how they’re getting better. But ultimately they end up talking more explicitly about their families and the different ways they feel isolated and alienated. They have idealized versions of one another. Each thinks the other one has such an amazing life. These idealizations of one another are so powerful that it’s hard to see past them.
What made you want to explore that idea?
Being a teenager lasts forever. You’re always in the process of becoming yourself. It’s the time when you start questioning your own desires and whether what you want is what you want other people to know you want. People develop these shames around the things they want.
These are two people who don’t have enough closeness with anyone where they can really share themselves. They’re in this environment where they’re meeting almost anonymously. It gives them a chance to explore each other and try out themselves, almost in private.
Athena has been cited as part of a recent rash of plays that focus on young women.
That stage of life feels like the stakes are so high that it’s right for putting on stage. I’ve always written about this topic. I think maybe what’s changed is theaters are programming these plays more. A lot of the ways that we talk about kids, like calling something childish, is demeaning. It’s the formative part of our life. I’m glad that theaters are realizing there’s an audience for it.
One of the characters says that fencing “hurts just as much as it needs to be effective.” You could take that literally. Or is it a metaphor?
So many sports involve pain. We have these kids physically harming one another to get a shot in college to have a better life. Whether you’re being tackled or poked, getting hurt is paired with losing. We like to gather to see these games where we watch someone win and watch someone lose and have to go home with the loss. We make this huge spectacle of it. Maybe fencing hurts more than just to be effective. Life’s challenges, competing, may be painful on other levels.
You created little dramas as a child. Then you got into fencing and went to the Junior Olympics. Eventually, you went back to writing. Tell me about that journey.
I got into a punishing, restrictive mindset where I felt like I needed to get into a good school and do well at sports. I felt theater was a waste of time. Sports and fencing was kind of a sad, painful time where I was isolated, practicing by myself. I wasn’t very social. I did enjoy it and I was growing and getting better. But it did feel like a way of denying myself relationships and being creative, denying my theater kid cringiness. I ended up getting back into theater and feeling like I got to more of a place of self-acceptance.
How did you start writing plays? Was that under the influence of parents who were artists?
No, I don’t know where that impulse came from. I just liked playing imagination games with friends when I was a kid. Then a day comes when your friends are like, “I don’t want to do the dolphin pirates anymore. We should play four square or one of these games that has set rules and expectations.” Where does that impulse to be imaginative go? For me, it went into wanting to write plays.
Reviews of Athena mention you have a gift for smart, snappy dialogue. How did you develop that ability? Do you like listening to people talk?
I was a quiet, creepy kid. I often find myself interested in other people’s conversations. If I’m not feeling particularly outgoing or safe expressing myself in certain situations, I retreat into listening. I love hearing how people talk, how people express themselves.
It’s so interesting when someone’s really opinionated or has an opinion that shocks me, or makes me reconsider my worldview, or makes me feel like I have to run home and change my life, when someone spits out something that I can’t wrap my head around. It comes from habitually rolling over things that people have said to me in my mind, having people’s cadences get stuck in my head.
Athena ends with a real-time fencing match. Did you know from the beginning that you were going to do that?
Yeah, I knew I wanted to do that from the beginning. One of the things that excited me about writing about this particular sport is you could really show it on stage. You could show a full-length fencing strip and a full bout. Most games you can’t, like an entire football game. It’s an emotional thing to watch.
You have such an obscure vision of the actors’ faces behind the masks. Being able to barely see their faces makes you lean in and scrutinize the actors’ performances. I felt it was the inevitable conclusion.
Your 2017 play Pussy Sludge doesn’t sound anything like Athena. When you write a play with that title and that strange premise, you have to know you’re going to get a strong reaction. Why did you write it?
I had a weird dream. The pipeline protests were happening, and I had this idea of a romantic comedy in a national park with a woman who’s stuck there. She’s fallen in love with her own filth, her own degeneracy, and can’t get out of it. It was expressing a particular emotion that I needed an entire play to express.
Details
Athena runs Sept. 5-29 at 3200 Main St. $13.50-38.50. undermain.org.
